(Photo by Patrick Hoesly)
It’s too easy to think (and hope) that there’s one-size-fits-all marketing advice. Your marketing strategy needs to reflect many aspects of your business. But one aspect that’s often forgotten is: How many sales do you need?
If you’re a general contractor, you don’t need a hundred (or even ten) clients – you likely need just a couple – since each “sale” will take you 6 months (or more) to satisfy. If you’re selling widgets (or smart phone applications), then you may need to sell tens of thousands to earn a sufficient income. These extreme examples would need different marketing systems (with a different lifetime value for these different customers).
If you need a large volume of clients, then you’re better off with a low-touch approach: email blasts, Facebook, Twitter, a well-stocked website, and easy-to-understand examples of your product or process. You don’t have enough time in the day to send everyone a personal email or phone call – and it’s likely not worth your time to do so. It is worth investing in tools to increase your online conversions – since you can scale the traffic to a website through advertising, but need to ensure that your visitors will become customers.
If you need to gain just a few clients, then you’re better off with both a low-touch and high-touch approach (personalized emails, follow up phone calls, personalized packets, and face-to-face consultations). For example, law firms routinely use pay-per-click advertising (low-touch) to find (high-worth) clients – and they routinely pay a lot of money for high-value clicks (for example, the cost for a PPC click for “new mexico mesothelioma lawyer” is over $400). The lead time is likely long for high-value clients, so it’s important that you start looking for your next client as soon as you get a new client. It may feel like you’re on a never-ending treadmill, but it’s better to keep a constant system in-place than trying to do a “big push”.
Remember: your marketing investment should be in proportion to the number of people and the value of each of these to your bottom line.